Idiotic idea fells another leader

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn did worst, with a likeability score of only 3.8 and Vince Cable did best with a score of 5.9. These scores, in part, may explain why Labour’s performance was poor and the Liberal Democrats did so well in the election.

Interestingly though, Nigel Farage had the same [low] score as May, indicating that there is more to the success of the Brexit Party than his popularity. Among the public as a whole the BrexTWIT leader is not that popular. What’s more, [devious self-promoter] Johnson was only marginally ahead of Theresa May on 4.4. This suggests that if he does succeed her as party leader he is not going to give the Conservatives much of a boost.

The public evaluates leaders using a variety of characteristics such as their competence, honesty, caring quality and other attributes. It turns out that these are all summarised rather well by asking people if they like or dislike a particular leader. If the public like a leader they are very likely to think that they are competent, honest and so on. [And, in DUHnocchio's case, those who are prejudiced/duped/ignorant are more likely to ignore LIAR-in-Chief's obvious crimes.]

http://theconversation.com/nigel-farage-triumphs-survey-reveals-what-drove-voters-to-the-brexit-party-in-the-european-elections-117865 .

Nigel Farage Is the Most Dangerous Man in Britain: He’s the most effective demagogue in a generation. Now he sets the agenda.

Nigel Farage is the British crisis in human form. His party, the unambiguously [and politically manipulatively] named Brexit BrexTWIT Party, which is hardly a party and didn’t exist six months ago, won nearly a third of the British vote in the recent European Parliament elections, putting it in first place and driving the shattered Conservative Party into fifth. Long underestimated, Mr. Farage has done more than any politician in a generation to yank British politics to the hard, nationalist right wrong. He is one of the most effective and dangerous demagogues Britain has ever seen.

With his last political vehicle, the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, Mr. Farage took an assortment of Tory retirees and a smattering of ex-fascists and other right-wing wrong-wing cranks, and welded them into a devastating political weapon: a significant national[ist] party. That weapon tore such chunks out of the Conservatives’ share of the vote that the party leadership felt compelled to call a referendum on Europe — which it then lost. Mr. Farage declared victory and went into semiretirement as a pundit.

Now, almost three years after the Brexit BrexTWIT vote, he’s back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/nigel-farage-brexit.html .

Theresa May to resign as prime minister - BBC News > .

I think that she was foolish to be so stubborn about an impossible task, but defeat by intransigent opposition is undoubtedly painful.


Britain on the Brink of Boris Johnson and Chaos: Theresa May exits but the BrexTWIT impasse will endure for the simple reason it makes no sense.

The impossible, in this case, has been BrexTWIT. Theresa May, the British prime minister who announced her resignation on Friday, turned the poisoned chalice of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union every which way in an attempt to make it palatable. She could not.

“Brexit means Brexit,” she famously intoned, without ever finding the courage or conviction to elaborate. This was a problem, given that the matter at hand was one of her country’s gravest peacetime decisions. Obstinacy, rather than some idea for Britain’s future, drove her. Britain had voted, almost three years ago now; she would be the delivery woman.

No matter that evidence of the negative impact of BrexTWIT accumulated daily — slower growth, lower investment, lost banking jobs, factory closures — or that the United Kingdom might break up or that Parliament three times rejected May’s proposed deal or that democracies have been known to change their minds about mistakes: She would persevere, until even she had to concede quitting was in “the best interests of the country.”

[Now please, for everyone's sake, stage another referendum and give the wiser Leave voters an opportunity to admit that they fell for a huge CON!]

[They won't, though, allowing a retreat is not in cunning Boris' plan:] Her most likely successor, given the extent of rabid pro-BrexTWIT sentiment among Tories, is Boris Johnson, the unscrupulous, ramshackle, flip-flopping, dissembling former foreign secretary, whose uncertain relationship with the truth and unwavering narcissism resemble Putin's-Puppet’s.

With Johnson as leader, the chances would increase of a so-called “Hard BrexTWIT” — Britain crashing out of the European Union at the new deadline of Oct. 31 without any arrangement to govern its future relationship with its neighbors. But Johnson has many enemies; and that scenario of supply chains severed, trucks piled up at Dover and Calais, British residents in Europe cast into limbo, and sheer administrative chaos at every level of finance, trade, industry and small business could lead some Tories to defect and renew the parliamentary impasse or bring down a Johnson government.

There are other candidates, including some like Home Secretary Sajid Javid or Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who are more committed to a deal with the union as the foundation for an orderly departure. But even as polls suggest many Britons have reconsidered their vote in 2016, and that a second referendum would reverse the result [which, if she had not been so stubborn, would have given Theresa May a way out of the mess], the Conservative Party is being pushed relentlessly rightward wrongward by the jingoistic, right-wing wrong-wing faction that Johnson most vividly embodies. Boris has wanted to be prime minister for a very long time; he will do anything to get to Downing Street.